Wednesday, March 7, 2012

London: Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, has unveiled a new add-on for the popular web browser that gives web users an instant view of which companies are “watching” them as they browse.

The move comes the same week that Google pushed ahead with its controversial new privacy policy, built to provide even more data for Google’s 28-billion-dollar advertising business, despite concerns that the massive harvesting of private data might be illegal in many countries.

According to Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs, the Collusion add-on will allow users to “pull back the curtain” on web advertising firms and other third parties that track people''s online movements.

Mozilla’s Firefox is the world’s second most popular web browser, a position under threat from Google’s own Chrome browser.

The Collusion add-on is an official Mozilla product, and was unveiled at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference this week by Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs.

“Collusion is an experimental add-on for Firefox and allows you to see all the third parties that are tracking your movements across the Web,” the Daily Mail quoted Mozilla as saying.

“It will show, in real time, how that data creates a spider-web of interaction between companies and other trackers,” it said.

Mozilla aims to build up a database of the worst offenders and make the data available to privacy campaigners.

“When we launch the full version of Collusion, it will allow you to opt-in to sharing your anonymous data in a global database of web tracker data.

“We’ll combine all that information and make it available to help researchers, journalists, and others analyze and explain how data is tracked on the web,” it added.